The growing popularity of social media and mobile marketing has caused many industry leaders to question whether email marketing is still a relevant consumer marketing channel. In fact, email remains an incredibly powerful and trusted communication v...

Whether you're just launching or in your third year of business, you won't succeed without loyal customers and brand ambassadors. Customer relationships and feedback are essential, but you need to understand how to toe the line between respectfully r...

It’s a mantra hammered into the heads of anyone who has ever owned a business, worked in a service industry or stepped foot in the world of sales: “The customer is always right.” Beyond simply placating customers, however, the modern take on this tri...

Sam asks, What are the best messaging platforms to communicate with users? Like many questions, this one can be answered rather easily, with: "It depends." Every startup's product is different, every message is different and there are a lot of ways t...

Aiming to take some of the mystery out of calculating ad spending on Facebook, social media marketing firm Syncapse has introduced a free online tool that lets brand managers do the math. The tool, which went live Thursday morning, takes into account...

The World at Work is powered by GE. This new series highlights the people, projects and startups that are driving innovation and making the world a better place. Name: Blackbaud Big Idea: Blackbaud provides customized organizational and fundraising s...

Jon Ferrara has a passion for social media, but he saw a weakness in it. For sales people building relationships, there wasn't an easy tool to manage those relationships on social media. Ferrara built Nimble, described as a way to combine CRM feature...

Like any other relationship, the foundation you establish with your client or customer is crucial to how the business relationship will develop over time. It requires taking the time at the start, going the extra mile and paying attention to detail. ...

Dave Toliver is the Director of Corporate Marketing at Angel, a leading provider of cloud based customer experience solutions. By developing innovative IVR, call center and voice applications that put the customer first, Angel is changing the way ent...

Killian Schaffer is VP/Strategy Director, CRM for Cramer-Krasselt/Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @kschaffs. Currently there’s a lot of buzz around social customer relationship management (CRM). Social media platforms and technologies like Fac...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: Connected Quick Pitch: Get all your con...

This post originally appeared on the American Express OPEN Forum, where Mashable regularly contributes articles about leveraging social media and technology in small business. Customer relationship management isn't just the domain of big brands, and ...

The Spark of Genius Series highlights a unique feature of startups and is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. Name: FellowUp Quick Pitch: FellowUp connects...

Umberto Milletti is the CEO of InsideView, the social CRM application which brings comprehensive sales intelligence gained from social media and traditional sources directly into any CRM platform for increased sales productivity and revenue. We’ve al...

Chris Boorman is the chief marketing officer and senior vice president of education & enablement at Informatica. He is responsible for Informatica's global voice to the market, which includes corporate, partner and field marketing. The thinking about...

Maria Ogneva is the director of social media at Nimble, a social relationship management solution that transforms your entire community into business opportunity by leveraging the best of customer relationship management, social media and communicati...

For teams who use Facebook and Twitter for business or organizations purposes, HootSuite has rolled out a slew of new features for assigning and sharing tasks. HootSuite’s Assignment function lets managers assign a Twitter update to any team member, ...

CoTweet, the Twitter CRM tool used by several massive brands including JetBlue and Ford, has been acquired by ExactTarget, an email marketing firm. In a statement, ExactTarget CEO Scott Dorsey said, ”By combining the power of ExactTarget and CoTweet,...

Gist, which has been in private beta for almost a year, is finally launching to the public and making their power networking service available to all. In our previous coverage, we've talked about Gist as the perfect utility for professionals looking ...

Today enterprise cloud computing company Salesforce.com announced the next evolution of its web based CRM product, Service Cloud 2. With Service Cloud 2, Salesforce.com is focusing on integrating social media into companies existing customized CRM sy...

You may know CoTweet as the Twitter CRM tool used by BestBuy, JetBlue, and Ford, and if you're a business Twitter user with multiple people managing multiple accounts, then you've probably been dying to try it. Now you can. Today CoTweet, formerly op...

PR and marketing types have their work cut out for them, especially in the age of social and new media where relationship building is so key. Gist is a great tool for power networkers that certainly helps users gain better insight into contacts and c...

Even though a Twitter business model is afoot, and it involves paid services, we can only speculate as to what the company will offer to brands. In the meantime, savvy startup CoTweet has come up with a magic formula for Twittering brands that is one...

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark. Na...

With the rise of social networking, many of us have hundreds if not thousands of online contacts. But how many of them do we actually keep up with? Probably not many. That’s the problem Zentact attempts to solve through a new service that keeps track...

Like many entries in the world of SaaS, Bizroof, a company offering a steadily growing CRM package, practices the art of incremental improvement, a concept popularized by Google, et al., which takes a semi-experimentalist approach to product developm...

Social sites like Facebook supposedly capture our social graph: the collection of people we connect with on the web. But they don't really let us do anything with the information. Sites like LinkedIn might let us message people a bit more easily, but...

Bizroof, an inhabitant of the SaaS industry in the form of a CRM software provider, has today introduced a fairly interesting upgrade. The service has established a connection with Yahoo's Fire Eagle. Users who have established Fire Eagle accounts, a...

CRM is more or less a staple of the SaaS (software as a service) market. Salesforce does it. Zoho does it. SugarCRM is in the game. Microsoft, too. All to better enhance management of customer relations across a workforce sized large and small. We ca...

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